The most common way to electronically represent the real world is with image data. Unlike traditional graph-based systems, there are systems which use panoramic images to construct a virtual world. The major advantage of a system which uses panoramic images is that very vivid and photo-realistic rendering results can be obtained even when using PCs. In addition, the cost of constructing the virtual world is independent of scene complexity. In such systems, panoramic images are stitched together into a panoramic map from several individual images which are acquired by rotating a camera horizontally or vertically. This panoramic map can be used in different applications such as movie special effects, the creation of virtual reality, or games. A typical problem is how to stitch the different pieces of a scene into a larger picture or map. One approach to address this problem is to manually establish correspondences between images to solve unknown parameters of their relative transformation. Because manual methods are tedious for large applications, automatic schemes are preferably used for generating a seamless panoramic image from different pieces of images.
One proposed approach uses a nonlinear minimization algorithm for automatically stitching panoramic images by minimizing the discrepancy in intensities between images. This approach has the advantage of not requiring easily identifiable features. However, this technique does not guarantee finding the global minimum if the selection of starting points is not proper. Further because the optimization process is time-consuming, the approach is inefficient. In this invention, the domain of images under consideration is panoramic images.